SCARS Institute
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Stroop Attention & Interference Self-Assessment
Stroop Attention & Interference Self-Assessment
A timed task that measures how well you can hold your attention on one thing when something more automatic is pulling at it. About six minutes.
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Keep your own copy
When you finish, you can save, email, or print your results on your own device — to keep, or to share with your therapist or mental health professional.
What this task measures
Reading is so automatic for adults that you cannot stop yourself from doing it. The Stroop task, first published by John Ridley Stroop in 1935, uses that fact. You will see color words such as RED or BLUE printed in colored ink, and your job is to respond to the color of the ink, not the word. When the word and the ink disagree, the reading habit interferes, and most people are slower and make more mistakes. The size of that slowdown is called the Stroop effect.
The effect reflects how well the brain can suppress a dominant response and stay on the instructed task. Psychologists use it to look at selective attention, inhibitory control, and processing speed. It is also sensitive to the things that load the mind down: stress, anxiety, poor sleep, grief, and intrusive thought. Many scam survivors notice that concentration is harder after the crime. This task lets you see one piece of that for yourself, in numbers.
How it works
- A short practice round, then three timed rounds of 24 items each.
- In every round, respond to the ink color as fast as you can without guessing. Tap or click the matching color button, or press the key shown on it.
- Round 1: words that match their ink. Round 2: rows of X in color. Round 3: words that do not match their ink. Your interference score is the difference between Round 3 and Round 2.
An optional fourth round
After the standard task you can choose to do one more round, based on the emotional Stroop paradigm used in trauma research. It replaces color words with ordinary words and with words related to scams, money, and trust, and measures whether the scam-related words slow you down more than the neutral ones. That slowdown is a rough indicator of whether scam material is still capturing your attention. It is optional, and you can skip it or stop at any time.
Before you begin: sit where you will not be interrupted, use a screen large enough to read comfortably, and do the task once at your own pace. If you have difficulty telling red from green or blue from yellow, your results will not be meaningful, and you should treat this as a demonstration only. Fatigue, medication, alcohol, and a poor night's sleep all slow this task; if any of those apply today, note it when you read your results.
Thank you for a good test.
My Stroop interference was 249 ms, my Slowdown Ratio was 1.19x, and my Accuracy on Conflict was 96%.
Good for memory